Disclaimer-- Gosho owns them, I don't, if I did, I'd have a heck of a lot less credit card debt. (sighs) This is the next installment in the Unprofessional Opinion series, if the title didn't give it away... just one more to go! Woohoo! This fanfic is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America for language and implied violence.

An Unprofessional Opinion-- Hattori Heiji

Damn it, Junior, I'm going to get you for this. You could have warned me. I told you my relatives were dragging me to Osaka, you could have said something. But no, you just snickered and told me to let you know if anything interesting happened.

You could have mentioned that the Edogawa kid had friends in Osaka that he liked to visit. You could have mentioned that one of said friends was a teenage detective. And if I find out you actually knew dead bodies literally fall out of the sky when those two get together, my revenge will be swift, terrible, and probably have the Kid teasing you for months.

But at the very least, you could have warned me not to mention your name around the Hattori kid. I got treated to a twenty-minute diatribe on how you have space for rent between your ears and a large stick lodged in an uncomfortable portion of your anatomy. And when I say diatribe, I mean a spate of language that turned the air blue and would probably send Nakamori-keibu looking for a thesaurus. It would almost have been poetic, if it wasn't setting nearby vegetation on fire.

That aside, I'm going to assume that smug snicker meant that you were expecting this encounter, and would like my opinion on the Detective of the West. After all, the other two profiles you requested were of detectives, and I can put a pattern together.

You're probably too young to remember Flip Wilson, even if you did have an interest in American comedians. Still, to quote the man, when it comes to Hattori Heiji, "What you see is what you get." Well, mostly. Nobody's a hundred percent exactly as they appear to be, but I'd guess this guy comes pretty close.

Actually, if I were in the business of diagnosis, I'd give him a tentative one of Asperger's Syndrome. Mild to moderate, but definitely there. He's got a ton of the behavioral markers for it. On the off-chance you aren't familiar with Asperger's, it's a developmental disorder on the autistic spectrum, differing mainly from classical autism by the fact that language skills are usually not affected. And Hattori definitely presents with a lot of the symptoms.

He's hyperkinetic-- I don't think I saw him stand still for more than a few minutes at a stretch. He's got the obsessive, narrow areas of focus; mysteries, baseball, and kendo, from what I hear. When he's got something to concentrate on, he hyperfocuses, but the rest of the time, he's got the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth.

And the social interaction problems? Hoo boy, I've seen contortionists who can't fit their feet that far into their mouths. Especially dealing with women-- he managed to piss off every girl in the area inside of four sentences, and had no idea what he'd said to provoke it. He's trained himself to pick up certain body-language cues from suspects, but it's obvious he only sees those when he's looking for them.

As is typical with AS positives, he doesn't seem to be very good at lying. I saw Edogawa step on his foot at least twice during the investigation, cutting him off before he said something. Since those interruptions were quickly followed by a chirpy comment, I'm guessing that Hattori was about to be painfully blunt, or possibly blow the line of investigation.

He's loud, he's rude, he's loyal to his friends and family to the point where you'd have to pry him off with a stick... he's overprotective, even of people he acknowledges can take care of themselves. He's supposed to be a kendo star, which probably helped smooth over a lot of the motor control problems that come with AS... but I bet his kanji are atrocious even after years of practice. Calligraphy will never be his strong suit.

It might explain the temper, too. AS positives tend to have problems identifying their emotions, and for males, it's way too easy to simply default to anger. It would also explain why everybody and their pet fish seems to believe he's in love with his best friend, but he's got no clue.

Speaking of friends and relationships, his interactions with Edogawa are real interesting. They're obviously close, which is really, really weird , if he does have AS. People with that syndrome don't make friends easily, and almost never with people that aren't on their intellectual level. I can't imagine that Hattori would be able to put up with a kid following him, not even a genius kid, for long. I had little brothers-- no matter how much you love 'em, you get to the point where you just want to throttle them to make them leave you alone.

Maybe it's the fact that Edogawa acts like an adult. Hattori's less likely to be creeped out by it, because he doesn't really 'get' the discrepancy. That would explain the body language, too. Most people, when they talk to little kids, bend over. Or they crouch, or somehow get face to face with the kid. It's a physical expression of the mental process of "lowering" yourself to their mental and emotional level. Hattori doesn't do that. Unless he's actually reaching out to mess the kid's hair up or something, which seems to be mainly done to irritate him, he talks to him from a perfectly normal standing position. Like they're equals, and Edogawa's just a lot shorter.